Puking My Hockey Rival

Chapter2

Luca

I did not stand up.

That was the first thing I noticed about myself. After everything that had happened in the past three hours, after the loss and the fight and the stick snapping in my hands, I sat in the dark and I did not stand up when I heard the door lock. I should have. Every reasonable instinct I possessed said I should have been on my feet and demanding answers. Instead I stayed exactly where I was and listened to the sound of his skates on the rubber mats and felt something in my chest move toward him the way a compass finds north.

"You're going to want to say something," Ronan said from behind me. "Go ahead. I can take it."

"Get out of my locker room."

"It's not your locker room anymore. Season's over."

I stood up then.

He was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed, still in full gear except for his helmet. His hair was damp from the game and there was a cut above his left eyebrow that I recognized as mine, from the third period when my elbow had caught him during a scramble in the corner. He did not look like a man who had just won a championship. He looked like a man who was waiting for something that had not happened yet.

"I will ask you one more time," I said. "Leave."

"Your hands are shaking."

I looked down without meaning to. He was right. I pressed them flat against my thighs and felt the tremor still moving through my fingers.

"Adrenaline," I said.

"Sure." He uncrossed his arms and moved to my left, slow and deliberate, keeping distance between us but circling just enough that I had to turn to keep him in my sightline. "How long has the shoulder been bad?"

The question landed somewhere unexpected.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You've been favoring it since Game Three. You rotate your stick grip when it flares. You did it fourteen times tonight." He paused. "I counted."

The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago.

"Why would you count that?"

"Because that's what I do." He stopped moving. We were eight feet apart in a dark locker room that smelled like ice and sweat and the aftermath of something I did not have words for. "You smile for the cameras like it hurts, Devereaux. You give these perfect interviews where you say all the right things and look like none of it costs you anything. And then you come out here every game and play like a man trying to outrun something."

"Stop."

"I'm just telling you what I see."

"You don't see anything about me."

"The insomnia is new this season," he said, as if I had not spoken. "Or worse this season. You have it under your eyes. Not tired. Insomnia is different. And management's been leaning on you. Sponsorship pressure, probably. Something about your public image. I saw the way your jaw tightened during the pre-game media session when they asked about your contract year."

I stared at him.

Nobody knew those things. Not my teammates. Not my coach. Not the reporters who followed me through every press day and post-game and team event. I had kept all of it locked in the exact place I kept everything that was too complicated to be useful. And Ronan Calloway had read it off my face from across a press room.

"How," I said, and I hated how flat my voice came out.

"I told you. I watched you." There was nothing strange in the way he said it, No edge, Just the flat statement of a fact he had already made peace with. "You want to know what I actually came in here for?"

"No."

"One meeting and I want it private. After every game we both play.. No cameras, no media, no performance. You take the mask off for an hour and I do the same."

I almost laughed. "You're insane."

"Maybe. Are you saying no?"

"I'm saying get out."

He stepped closer like a predator, just close enough that I had to make a choice about whether to step back but I did not step back.

"You've been angry at me for three years," he said quietly. "Every time we're on the same ice, you play like I personally owe you something. And I've been trying to figure out what it is."

"You're imagining things."

"You broke your stick tonight." His voice dropped. "Luca Devereaux, twelve seasons, two Olympic golds, three All-Star appearances, and you have never broken a stick on the ice in your career. I looked it up. Not even once." He held my stare. "Until tonight."

The silence between us stretched into something I could feel against my skin. The darkness of the room pressed in from all sides and he was close enough that I could hear him breathing and I was aware of every inch of the distance that remained between us.

"One meeting," he said again. "That's all I'm asking."

"No."

He accepted that without pushing. Just nodded once, like he had expected it, like refusal was simply one step in a process he had already mapped out. Then he moved toward the door and I should have felt relieved and I did not feel relieved at all.

He stopped with his hand on the door.

"You don't hate me nearly as much as you want to."

He left without waiting for my answer. I stood in the empty locker room for a long time after that. Long enough that the adrenaline fully left my body and what replaced it was something quieter and harder to name. The kind of thing that settles into the chest like a stone and does not shift no matter how many times you try to reframe it.

My hands were still shaking..